Vozrozhdeniya Island (Russian: Остров Возрождения, Ostrov Vozrozhdeniya, which translates as Rebirth Island or Renaissance Island) was an island in the Aral Sea during the Soviet Union. Now the former island is owned by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (as of the early 1980s). In 1954, a biological weapons test site called Aralsk-7 was built there and on the neighboring Komsomolskiy Island.[1]

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Vozrozhdeniya was once a small island; however, the island began to grow in size in the 1960s as the Aral Sea dried up due to its feeder rivers being dammed by the Soviet Union for agricultural projects.[2] The shrinkage of the Aral continued and accelerated, and Vozrozhdeniya became a peninsula in mid-2001 when the channel to its south dried up completely and became a land bridge.[3] Upon the disappearance of the Southeast Aral Sea in 2008, Vozrozhdeniya effectively ceased to exist as a distinct geographical feature. It briefly reemerged as a peninsula in 2010 when the eastern basin was flooded by heavy snow melt.

In the 1990s, word of the island's danger was spread by Soviet defectors, including Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet Union's bioweapons program.[5] It was here, according to recently released documents, that anthraxspores and bubonic plaguebacilli were made into weapons and stored. The main town on the island was Kantubek, which lies in ruins today, but once had approximately 1,500 inhabitants.

The laboratory staff members abandoned the small island in 1992.[6] Many of the containers holding the spores were not properly stored or destroyed, and over the last decade many of these containers have developed leaks.

In 2002, through a project organized and funded by the United States with Uzbekistan assistance, 10 anthrax burial sites were decontaminated.[7]

In the video game Command & Conquer: Generals, the island was under U.S. occupation but was captured by the fictional Global Liberation Army.

The area and its former Soviet biological weapons base and laboratories was featured in a mission in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops.

In the novel The Home Team: Weapons Grade, by Dennis Chalker and Kevin Dockery, the villains dig two metric tons of "Anthrax 836" up from an impromptu dump site 11 km from Rebirth Island for use in a terror plot.[8]